Lecture Notes Prep with LaTeX

Here are some of the highlights:

• Supports Socratic method of teaching by laying things out in question-answer discussion form.
• Has an alternative to the \title command that identifies that the files is for lecture notes.
• Groups of exercises can be added in subsubsections.
• By setting one flag, you can change the notes to be either for students or for instructors. Student versions hide answers to questions and solutions to exercises. (You can reveal these in the student version as desired.)
• More improvements can be made, so I've put it all up on GitHub.

Here are the PDFs generated by the example file (available below):

• Student Version
• Instructor Version

Visit the GitHub Repository for all the files and version-control goodness, or download them individually:

• LectureNotes.sty
• lectureNotesExample.tex

I've been posting my lecture notes as Open Educational Resources. In order to do that, I made the following changes to my lecture notes before uploading them to our school repository. (This list doubles as a reminder of the things I need to do and provide to Christin for uploading. Thanks, Christin!)

1. Go through all the images included in the notes and ensure that they are all okay to share.
2. Added a footnote to the end of the title about getting in touch with me about comments: \lectureNotesTitle{Banana Monkeys and their Habitat\footnote{Kyle would always like to hear about how useful his notes are. If you have any comments about these, please email him at \url{paithanq@gmail.com}.}}
3. Choose searchable keywords for the notes. (These are needed for Plymouth State's digital commons repository.)
4. Add an abstract. (Also needed for our repository, but it seems like a good thing to do anyways.) I added this to match the abstract upon uploading.
5. Choose a license for (the student version of) your notes. (Here's the Creative Commons license-choosing page. I chose the CC-BY license.) You can apply it in LaTeX by using the doclicense package like this:

   \usepackage[
       type={CC},
       modifier={by},
       version={4.0},
   ]{doclicense}                
                   

   Then you can display the license choice (complete with nice image) by including this code: (I've been doing this directly before the abstract.) \iftoggle{forStudents}{\doclicenseThis}{} Alternatively, I wrote a macro that displays either the license info (student version) or a request to not distribute (instructor version). Add \warningOrLicense to use that.
6. There is automatically a nice footer added as a part of the lecture notes style package, but, since this includes a copyright, it's probably a good idea to include the license info there too. Since I'm using the CC-BY license, I included the ccicons LaTeX package and created a macro to show the license symbol only in the student version: \footerWithLicenseOnStudentV{\ccby} (Yes, you have to specify the license symbol... or you can just include nothing there.)
7. Add an acknowledgement to Christin (or your resident resource expert) for helping get everything ready!

Here are some of the lecture notes files (student versions) I've created with this. (Some of them don't use all of the functionality of package as I created them before adding the functionality. Also, many of them are incomplete as I don't always have time to spell everything out before I teach it the first time.)

• Intro Programming: Plymouth State Repository Version, Current working version.
• Data Structures: Plymouth State Repository Version, Current working version.
• Matrix Algorithms.
• Theory of Computation: Plymouth State Repository Version, Current working version.
• Software Engineering: Plymouth State Repository Version, Current working version.
• Operating Systems.